Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
A cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things
This is the best season of your life.
The morning wind spreads its fresh smell.
We must get up and take that in,
That wind that lets us live.
Breathe before it’s gone.
This piece of food cannot be eaten
nor this bit of wisdom found by looking.
There is a secret core in everyone not
even Gabriel can know by trying to know.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
Don’t make any sense.
This we have now is not imagination.
This is not grief or joy.
Not a judging state,
Or an elation, or sadness.
These come and go.
This is the presence that doesn’t…
What else could human beings want?
When grapes turn into wine,
They’re wanting this.
When the night sky pours by,
It’s really a crowd of beggars,
And they all want some of this!
This
That we are now
Created the body, cell by cell,
Like bees building a honeycomb.
The human body (and the universe) grew from this, not this
From the universe and the human body.
This is how a human being can change:
there’s a worm addicted to eating
grape leaves.
Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he’s no longer
a worm.
He’s the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn’t need
to devour.
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
Still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now.
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has abysses, these abysses belong to us. If there are dangers, we must try to love them, and only if we could arrange our lives in accordance with the principle that tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us to be alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races-the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you've ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you. Life has not forgotten you; that it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall.
Now we will count to twelve
And we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
Let’s not speak in any language;
Let’s stop for one second,
And not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
Without rush, without engines;
We would all be together
In a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea
Would not harm whales
And the man gathering salt
Would look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
Wars with gas, wars with fire,
Victories with no survivors,
Would put on clean clothes
And walk about with their brothers
In the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
With total inactivity;
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single minded
About keeping our lives moving,
And for once could do nothing,
Perhaps a huge silence
Might interrupt this sadness
Of never understanding ourselves
And of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
As when everything seems dead
And later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
And you keep quiet and I will go.
An image about practicing meditation that may be helpful is that of standing at a railroad crossing, watching a freight train passing by. In each transparent boxcar, there is a thought. We try to look straight ahead into the present, but our attachments draw our attention into the contents of the passing boxcars: we identify with the various thoughts. As we attend to the train, we notice there's supper in one boxcar, but we just ate, so we’re not pulled by that one. The laundry list is the next one, so we reflect for a moment on the blue towel hanging on the line to dry, but we wake up quite quickly to the present once again, as the next boxcar has someone in it meditating and we recall what we're doing. A few more boxcars go by with thoughts clearly recognized as thoughts. But, in the next one is a snarling lion chasing someone who looks like us. We stay with that one until it's way down the line to see if it got us. We identify with that one because it "means" something to us. We have an attachment to it. Then we notice we've missed all the other boxcars streaming by in the meantime and we let go of our fascination for the lion and bring our attention straight ahead into the present once again.
We stick to some and we don't stick to others. The train is just there - and the silent witness who's standing at the crossroads also seems to be there. Those are the first stages of trying to be mindful, trying to stay in the here, and now.
Then, as we're a bit more used to being aware of the contents, we start noticing the process of the train going by-just boxcar after boxcar-and our attention doesn't follow every stimulus: we don't keep getting lost down the track in the past or anticipating what's coming from the future. So, we're looking straight ahead, not distracted by any of the contents, when all of a sudden, one of the boxcars explodes as it goes by. We're drawn out into that one, we jump into the action in that boxcar. Then we come back with a, wry smile full of recognition that it was just an image of an explosion, just a boxcar thought. And, again, we face straight ahead with just the process of passing boxcars, when there we are beating our spouse in one of the boxcars. There's all kinds of stuff in the mind. And we’re going to follow it, to be pulled by it, until we start seeing the impersonal, conditioned nature of the contents and recognize the perfect flow of the process itself.
Then, we notice as we look straight ahead that we're starting to be able to see between the cars. And we begin to see what's on the other side of the train, what is beyond thought. We experience that the process is occurring against a background of undifferentiated openness, that, moment to moment, mind is arising and passing away in vast space.
As we experience the frame of reference in which all this melodrama is occurring, it begins freeing us from being so carried away - even by fear. We start seeing. "Ah, there's the exploding boxcar trick again," or "There's the angry boss one again." Whatever it is, we start seeing it as part of the process. We see it in context. The small mind that identifies with all that stuff starts becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, starts encompassing even itself in a mind so vast it has room for everything and everyone, including the train, and the observer. And, then, even that fellow standing at the crossroads watching turns out to be just the contents of one of those boxcars, just another object of mind. And awareness, standing nowhere, is everywhere at once.
For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.
And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.
What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what will be, darling citizen.
So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn,
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.